I'm not the woman I used to be...

I was thinking about eyes whilst I was doing my workout this morning. More specifically, I was thinking about the way that your eyesight fails you as you get older and the fact that I wish I had hung on longer before I succumbed to wearing specs.

I used to pride myself on my eyesight. Both my Mum and Dad wear glasses and have done for as long as I can remember and my brother started wearing glasses in his 30’s. When I hit my 40’s, my eyesight was still perfect and I suppose I felt a bit smug really when everyone around me at work had to find their specs before they could read anything.

Then, when I was 43, all of a sudden (or so it seemed) I found that I was having a problem reading phone numbers in the directory. That was all. I could see everything else. It was just phone numbers that I was struggling with. So I decided to go for an eye test.

Now I know that, ideally, you should go for a regular eye test, whether you wear glasses or not. But I hadn’t. I’d never had one, in fact. So off I went, got myself tested and came out with a prescription which I duly exchanged for a pair of reading glasses and a free pair of prescription sunglasses.

That was the beginning of my problems. Within a month, I went from not being able to read the occasional phone number to being completely unable to read without glasses. Now I’m pretty sure that my eyes didn’t really deteriorate that much within the space of a month – in fact, if they did, they must have immediately stopped deteriorating at the end of the month, because my vision has remained the same during the last 4 years.

I’m sure that an optician would have an explanation for it and I certainly don't regret going for that initial eye test because diseases like Glaucoma can only be detected by regular testing, but, personally, I wish I’d just bought a magnifying glass instead of a pair of specs…